Catholic Sexual Morality vs. Population Growth Fears

I will say, that, as pro-life as I am, and as religious (I am currently practicing as a Lutheran although raised Catholic with a devout mother, to whom I am very close), time and time again, I come back to the realization that the way population biology works, is that there are boom and bust cycles, with the busts driven by intense competition for resources, die-off and predation.

I acknowledge and understand the terrible consequences of the Pill, as it renders females utterly available and at the mercy of the intense male libido, however I maintain that, within a committed marriage, non-abortive birth control methods make sense.

Also, to your point about the slowing of world birthrates, and the low birthrates in developed nations: true...but this has been achieved not ONLY via women's education and later marriage, but significantly through widespread contraceptive use and sadly, abortion. If you could show me a nation where the TFR hovered around 2.2, and all or most participants practiced NFP as the sole method of limiting births, then I might reconsider. Again (I have been on your site before as mary lee I think), I have no qualms whatsoever with any specific couple lovingly, and honestly deciding to bring many children into the world, but my view is shaped by an understanding that many other couples will contracept while others never marry. I live in a state with a European-style TFR (Massachusetts), so a large family here and there is a beautiful thing to see.

If you read the comments section for the article I sent you, you see an unrelenting hatred of people who have many (or even several) children. Many seem ill-informed and ignorant, but many others truly believe that abortion and contraception are absolutely necessary to keep our numbers in check.

Also...many Catholics I know urge early marriage, as a way to stop the ridiculous prolongation of adolescence in our culture through the twenties (something I agree with), and to place the intense erotic desire of the twenties where it belongs--in marriage--rather than let it drift through numerous premarital encounters.

It seems to me that there are at least two distinct questions here:

1) Is it necessary for us to engage in some sort of conscious fertility management in order to avoid a boom and die-off cycle?

2) If it is necessary for us to consciously manage our fertility in order to avoid this kind of boom and die-off cycle, is it possible for a society to do this using the means approved of by the Catholic Church, or is artificial birth control necessary?

I'll do my best to deal with each of these in turn.

In dealing with 1), I think it is worth pausing to consider whether the boom and die off phenomenon which we see among many animal populations is in fact something we see or are likely to see among humans. At first pass, it may seem odd to ask this. We know that a human population can reach a point in which it is unable to continue to exist on the resources it has available. If resources available to human populations are limited, wouldn't we expect to see humans subject to the same population boom and bust dynamics that other animals are?

I'm not sure, however, that this is as much the case as it would at first seem. We humans are far, far more adaptable than animals. While a gazelle can eat only certain plants, and live only within a certain range, we change our ranges and our food sources radically based on need. Since the '70s we have reached a point in which world food production significantly exceeds what would be needed to feed the entire population quite healthily -- famines tend to be the result of political manipulation (some people keeping others from getting food) or from crop or climate catastrophes in those areas of the world in which people are still living on the basis of subsistence agriculture rather than participating in the global food marketplace. The NY Times author refers to this obliquely when he observes that the Earth can in fact support a population even significantly larger than 7 Billion -- just not necessarily in what we in the US consider a "normal" lifestyle. Because people tend to move around or come up with new innovations when they come under resource pressure, it seems to me that it's particularly hard to sit down and form expectations about what our problems will be in 50 years or 100 years based on population growth. Back in 1900 or 1950, deciding that we needed to radically limit our fertility would have been one "out" from what looked like a lot of space and resource pressures. However, modern technologies and the green revolution have done far more to improve living standards across the world than simply assuring that people bred less would have done. And all those innovations were the result of people who were born. The greatest resource of all, for humanity, is human beings themselves.

Starting to deal with 2): The same consciousness and flexibility which makes it far easier for humans to move to other regions or seek other sources of food also renders the question of what is "conscious fertility management" much more difficult. In our current society, with artificial birth control as an assumption, we tend to think within the context of most people entering into sexual relationships around the time they reach cultural adulthood, and we assume the main question is whether those people will have lots of children or instead use birth control or abortion to avoid that. We assume that like animals we will virtually all become sexually active at a certain point in our physical developments, and that the question is simply whether we will, like them, continue to reproduce until we exceed our resources, or whether we will use artificial means to limit our fertility.

However, when we look back to times and places where human populations found themselves under serious resource pressure, what we see is not just changes in how people comport their sexual activities, but changes in a host of cultural norms and structures that determine whether people enter into sexual relationships at all. People often married later, and a lot more people didn't get married at all. This could mean going into the religious life, or some other occupation which ruled out marriage, but often it simply meant extended families in which unmarried siblings or uncles and aunts were part of the household on a long term basis. This is how a lot of Western European countries (particularly resource poor ones like Ireland) maintained fairly steady population for long periods of the late Medieval, Rennaissance and early Modern eras. It wasn't just that people died earlier and child mortatily was higher in these societies, people made life decisions about marraige based on their perceptions of their ability to support a family. I'm short of Googling time to uncover the reference again, but I seem to recall that Ireland pre 1800 was one of the more extreme examples with an average marriage age for women around 27 and less than 50% of reproductive age women being married at any given time (as in, of the woman at any given time between 15 and 40, less than 50% were married).

Now, I'm betting that none of this is sounding like much fun. Most of us want to get married, we want to have our own households, we want to have kids. I tend to be something of a technological optimist, and so I think that our ability to provide for ourselves with the resources available will tend to grow with our needs. However, I also think that our expectations and culture are shaped a lot by signals that we get from our circumstances without even thinking about it. Things that seem standard (whether living in a stand-alone house, driving a car, or eating a meat heavy diet) will start to seem unnecessary luxuries if our society really comes under resource pressure. Getting married young would start to seem a lot less attractrive, and living with your parents while working would start to seem a lot more attractive, if we really were strapped for the resources to maintain current lifestyles.

Given our flexibility and our inventiveness, I think that rather than maintaining an unsustainable lifestyle right up to some sort of population catastrophy, we'd tend to see our lifestyles and culture change due to resource pressures being felt and responded to.

How does all this relate to Catholic prohibitions of birth control and sterilization? Well, I think that we tend to adapt to circumstances using whatever tools we think of as available. If, culturally, we think of sterilization and contraception as available, and they may form part of a "solution" to certain pressures that seems more attractive than Catholic suggestions. However, I think that taking them off the table we're still very much able to adapt as individuals or as a society to circumstances of tightening resources.

Those of us living as Catholics in the modern, secular West have a slightly different problem. We face a society in which certain coping mechanisms (contraception, sterilization, abortion, cohabitation) are often used in order for people to balance their desire for pleasure and relationships with their desire to lead a certain kind of lifestyle. Our society as a whole is built around those assumptions, and so as a small minority those who eschew these find ourselves working uphill. Many in the Catholic subculture solve this disparity by simply having more children than the norm, and accepting the lifestyle trade-offs that involves. But I don't think that necessarily means that a culture in which most people were Catholics faithful to Church teaching would look like our culture, but with most people marrying young and having 4+ children. I think such a culture would look, overall, a lot different from ours, and would achieve its own balance between resources and population through other cultural means than "just add birth control".

Dewey and Dakin used nineteenth century population statistics to show that human societies tend to follow the same sigmoidal population growth curve that other animals do. The curve itself is S-shaped, but the rate is constantly decreasing.

If you combine two populations that follow this tendency, one using the other as food, you can get boom-bust cycles, but that isn't the only solution to that differential equation.

In conversation, I've found many people find the idea that human fertility is regulated by a feedback loop is unbelievable, but as a Thomist I don't find it surprising at all.

I doubt that humans are likely to have a boom-and-bust population pattern.

Animal populations often show a boom-and-bust pattern caused by overshoot. If humans are animals we must beware of overshoot, which means we must be concerned about overpopulation long before there is any real evidence of it.

On the other hand, ecologically speaking humans are plants. (Plants rarely have overshoot problems.) When there are more of a species of animal there is less of what that animal eats. When there are more of a species of plant, the resources the plant needs either increase (soil) or stay the same (sunlight).

The only resources that humans treat the way animals do are fossil fuels and wild fish. Both of those should be obsolete soon.

At first I was hesitating on the boom and bust cycles being caused by predation, but then it occurred to me that of course herbivores are predators: of plants. The crash among a herbivorous population is caused by crashing the plant population they prey on.

The S curve trend would seem to suggest a basic Stasis - New Opportunity - Stasis progression, which arguably is what we've seen in the last couple hundred years for humanity. Prior to the 1700s there was a period of comparative stasis that lasted several hundred years. In the last 200-300 years we've seen rapid growth, but we're now pretty clearly leveling off.

Some pro-natalists like to talk a lot about the likelihood of an impending population crash due to low fertility rates, but I'm inclined to think that this will (with a bit of cultural and migratory turbulence) solve itself and we'll end up with some kind of relative stasis.

Joseph,

That's a fascinating point about human populations behaving like plants ecologically speaking. I think you're right.

Thanks Darwin for your commentary. I am currently engaged in a discourse with John C. Wright over this very topic:http://www.scifiwright.com/2011/01/malthus-and-the-reverse-cassandra-effect/(scroll to last few comments)

Much to think about, and it is late here, but I will say, I still cannot understand how folks do not realize that any attempts by humans to regulate their fertility in eons past absolutely includes contraceptive methods in large degree (in addition to later marriage etc.) Onanism is and was a widely-used regular method. The Pill is certainly something new (and terrible), but there have been countless measures before it. Therefore, I find it hard to reconcile myself to the idea that Catholic doctrine regarding contraception, (within a marriage) in true application, would not result in an extraordinary baby boom.

In imagining what "controlling ones fertility in keeping with environmental pressures" looks like, I come up with our present scenario for such resources as land here in the Northeast, or Cod stocks in the Atlantic. People here delay marriage and family to an almost absurd degree as they pursue extensive study to prepare themselves for an evermore specialized work environment, and try to save for a downpayment on a housing stock (or even first, last and deposit)where $250K gets you nothing. They are not, however, delaying sexual experience. Quite the contrary. If the whole of my state was to embrace the teachings of Theology of the Body tomorrow, I would bet that hordes of young people would be crowding to the altar before college, or very soon thereafter. Perhaps some would delay marriage and sexual activity or diligently adhere to NFP to limit their family sizes, but I suspect, the overall result would be a return to prewar birthrates.

I'll take a look at the John C. Wright thread -- he's one of those interesting guys I should follow more than I do. A couple responses:

Much to think about, and it is late here, but I will say, I still cannot understand how folks do not realize that any attempts by humans to regulate their fertility in eons past absolutely includes contraceptive methods in large degree (in addition to later marriage etc.) Onanism is and was a widely-used regular method.

Certainly, in any time and place, people always try to find easier ways out of what they perceive as difficult situations. Contraception, whether in a modern form or in imitating more literally "Onan's sin" is a way to try to satisfy both the desire for sexual satisfaction and for avoiding pregnancy at the same time. Humans being what they are, I can't imagine any situation in which that wouldn't be attractive to many people -- just as pornography, masturbation and prostitution have an enduring popularity.

I don't necessarily think, however, that the neatness with which these "solutions" appear to address the immediate desire necessarily means they are right. It just means that people tend to be good at selecting sins that do in fact scratch their immediate "itch".

Therefore, I find it hard to reconcile myself to the idea that Catholic doctrine regarding contraception, (within a marriage) in true application, would not result in an extraordinary baby boom.

In the middle to upper middle class American context in which this conversation is often being had, I think that's probably pretty accurate. If people really did have to make an absolute choice between avoiding sex half to two thirds of the time within marriage and having 3-5 kids instead of 1-2, I think you'd see a lot more people having larger families in that segment of society. But then, but of the issue there is that we're living in by far the most affluent society in history. Middle class families in America, could have a few more kids on average without making the truly difficult resource trade offs. (With five kids, our kids each have less money spent on them then the families with two kids up and down the street -- but they're certainly not hurting by world or even US standards.)

So yes, I think if there were wide acceptance of Catholic teaching on the topic, there would tend to be more Americans and Americans would, on a per capita basis, tend to be a bit poorer -- but I don't necessarily have a problem with that.

In imagining what "controlling ones fertility in keeping with environmental pressures" looks like, I come up with our present scenario for such resources as land here in the Northeast, or Cod stocks in the Atlantic.

Though the difference to keep in mind is that unlike Cod we grow our own food and decide how much land to cultivate and how. We also decide what to eat.

And when it comes to places like the Northeast and housing values -- there's also the escape valve of emigration. I grew up in Los Angeles which has equally ludicrous housing values, and my solution as someone who got married right out of college was to leave for Texas and later Ohio. Salaries in Middle America are barely lower than on the coasts, and the mortgage payment on our 1800sq/ft three bedroom house in Texas was less than the rent had been on the one bedroom apartment in one of the middle-dreary parts of Los Angeles.

If the whole of my state was to embrace the teachings of Theology of the Body tomorrow, I would bet that hordes of young people would be crowding to the altar before college, or very soon thereafter.

Well, here's the thing, though: when you get married isn't necessarily just a matter of when you would really like some action. This summer I'll be heading off to two weddings of old friends, of similar Catholic moral outlook on these issues, who are getting married for the first time in their early 30s for the fairly basic and old fashioned reason that they didn't meet the right person until later in life. (Come to that, MrsD and I dated and were engaged for a total of nearly 4 years, because we knew we shouldn't get married till we were out of college and working full time.) Waiting long periods for marriage isn't necessarily fun, but people do it all the time if they have sufficient determination.

I guess part of what I'm not getting here is what seems to be in implicit idea that we should set our definition of virtue as something which most people can achieve fairly easily. It seems to me that what makes something right or wrong is whether it's right or wrong, not whether people can pull it off easily. A lot of elements of being virtuous (especially the "little things" like just treating people well and being more attached to their needs than to our possessions) are really dang hard.

Hi! Happy New Year!Jumping back in: You said "It seems to me that what makes something right or wrong is whether it's right or wrong, not whether people can pull it off easily" I totally agree with this. But why is contraception within a marriage a bad thing? I know many very happily married people who contracepted and have a few kids who have made it all the way through (nearly) to their nearly golden anniversary. The problem is not contraception...it is respect for others and acceptance of commitment and willingness to work for it. Radical femminism did not help matters, as it taught women to hate men.

I am sure you are aware that up until the 1970's a woman's cycle was not really understood, hence the famous failure of the rhythm method. Today, with all the new, more reliable methods and fertility monitors etc. one can actually practice NFP with some success at delaying a pregnancy. Therefore, it would seem that prior to this, there was no way to avoid pregnancy within a marriage without celibacy. I know many families (my own extended one) where the babies just came one after another, and the women were beaten down (especially since breast feeding was discouraged during this period). Many of those women went on to counsel their daughters to use contraception in their own marriages. Some of my own aunts described a "fear" and "loathing" of their husbands, as they were terrified of getting pregnant for the 8th or 9th time in 12 years.

I'm going to focus on this particular quote, as I think it deals with the crux of the issue:

But why is contraception within a marriage a bad thing? I know many very happily married people who contracepted and have a few kids who have made it all the way through (nearly) to their nearly golden anniversary.

I think the second sentence here, as with additional anecdotal material that comes further on, is somewhat misplaced. With any given sin or vice, we're going to find some people who are regular practitioners of it who proclaim themselves very happy and the better for it. Dealing strictly with married sexuality, I take it that even if someone insisted that they'd found use of pornography to improve their marriage, or sending the husband off to use the services of a prostitute at times to be a good way to relieve tensions and expectations, we would not thereby accept this testimony as proving that these were good ways of having a marriage.

So the real question is: Why is contraception within a marriage a bad thing?

The basic answer, I'm sure, you're well familiar with: The Church believes that there is a basic integrity to human sex, such that it contains elements of union, pleasure and fertility. To intentionally exclude one or more of these in order to enjoy the others is considered wrong. Thus, masturbation is considered wrong because it seeks to gain the pleasure of sex without accepting its unitive and fecund aspects. Having sex outside of marriage is wrong because it rejects or shams the unitive aspects of sex -- enjoying the pleasure of the act but with someone to whom one is not truly united in marriage. IVF and artificial insemination are wrong because they seek to conceive outside of the context of union and pleasure in the sexual act. And contraception is wrong because it involves removing the fertility from sex in order to enjoy the pleasure and unity without consequences.

So to make the classic analogy: I personally have something of a weakness for food and drink. I really enjoy the taste of good food, and good alcohol, and I hate to stop eating and drinking because it just tastes so good. However, there are clear consequences to overeating or overdrinking. Having lost thirty pounds over a couple years and stayed pretty stable at a healthy weight (something which is more than a matter of vanity when one has a lot of relatives with late onset diabetes) I know that if I keep eating just because I want to, I'll have to deal with effects I don't want. Similarly, if I could somehow always feel like I was on my second drink, I'd happily drink all the time. But know that however much I may enjoy the taste and effects of one or two drinks, if I keep drinking I'll eventually regret it.

In terms of mastery of the body, contraception is like deciding that the solution to this set of problems is: Oh, so I just need to eat and then purge. OKAY!!!

This is where NFP (and it's less pleasant cousin, periodic abstinence) achieve similar effects through an acceptance of how the human body actually works: I you want to not get pregnant you have to commit to note having sex for significant portions of the time.

This is why NFP advocates talk about practicing NFP being good for your relationship or divorce proofing your marriage. In some ways, perhaps, the claim is a little deceptive. It's not that abstaining half the time is just so much fun that no one who does it will ever want to fight or separate. It's that if people embrace that challenge and learn to love and care for each other respectfully within the context of not demanding sex from the other when they're agreed that they're not ready to deal with the consequences, the couple will in the process end up developing a level of self control and mutual respect which is very helpful in other aspects of marriage.

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